Published 20 March 2024 at 14.56
Foreign. US President Joe Biden was informed in October that Israel was carrying out indiscriminate bombings against civilians. Even so, the US president continued to publicly defend the Israeli military's behavior, the Washington Post reports.
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On October 27, three weeks into Israel's war on Hamas, Biden's top foreign policy officials informed a small group at the White House that “Israel regularly bombed buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets”.
That reveals – surprisingly – the liberal Washington Post, which cites three sources with knowledge of the meeting.
The officials also reportedly expressed concern that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had no clear plan to defeat Hamas. One of the sources stated that “from the very beginning there has been a feeling that we did not know if the Israelis were going to do what they said they were going to do”.
Two weeks before the meeting, Biden himself visited Israel and publicly declared that the United States will always support the country. On the same day as the meeting, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told a press briefing that the United States would not impose any “red lines” on how Israel conducted the war. They would therefore let it continue without intervening, despite the very extensive civilian death toll.
However, the meeting did little to change the rhetoric of Biden or those closest to him. The president did not criticize Israel for the repeated bombings of a refugee camp in early November. Likewise, the White House publicly supported Israel's decision to bomb Gaza's main hospital later that month, when Kirby told reporters that Hamas had a hidden command center under the facility.
Behind the scenes, however, American officials were worried that such a statement would be seen by the Israelis as a “green light” to attack the hospital, writes the Washington Post.
In line with growing discontent from his own voters, Biden has has since become more critical of Netanyahu. As early as January, the US president claimed that he was “quietly” working with the Israeli government to scale back the war “significantly” – but to little effect.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Friday that he approved the plans to attack the border town of Rafah in southern Gaza. Rafah is currently home to more than a million Palestinians displaced from other parts of the enclave.
Joe Biden told MSNBC earlier in March that an Israeli operation there would cross a “red line”. He partially backtracked moments later, stressing that Netanyahu “has the right to defend Israel,” but that he must “pay more attention to the innocent lives that are being lost.”